Harassment in Egypt, Then and Now

A recent front-page story in The New York Times about harassment and sexual assaults on women in Egypt, which have increased over the past two years, reminds me of my own experience there more than three decades ago.

I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo in the late 1970s. From my arrival in Egypt to my departure, I can't remember a harassment-free day. Indeed, the harassment began on the day I landed at Cairo International Airport.

Arriving at the airport, bleary from a difficult overnight flight from London, I grabbed the only taxi at the outside stand. I spoke some Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and I asked the driver, Mohammed, to take me to the American University.

The sun had barely risen when I got into Mohammed's cab, but when he dropped me off at the university at closing time, I'd seen much of Cairo as well as the Great Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza. Throughout the abduction Mohammed would try to steer the car with his left hand, while trying to grope one of my legs with his right hand – a driving feat, considering I had pinned myself against the right backseat door.

Mohammed wasn't just running up the meter, he wanted to marry me. In fact, we stopped briefly at his uncle's souvenir shop and perfume palace near the pyramids and Mohammed told him that we were getting engaged.

“May God grant a successful conclusion [to the engagement],” his uncle said, handing me a small green glass vial of eye kohl through the cab window.

God, in his mercy, concluded this unwanted tour around 5 p.m. But Mohammed stalked me for another week, showing up at the university and at the apartment on the Nile River island of Zamalek, which I shared with two roommates. They had a head start on harassment management, and I seem to remember that they told Mohammed to hit the road.

The city bus we rode to the university was a daily opportunity for groping by Egyptian men. One morning, I remember getting on the bus which was overloaded with workers — especially men in drab pants and v-necked sweaters, mostly bureaucrats who worked in government administrative offices around Tahrir Square. I was clutching my textbooks and pocketbook, and trying to keep my balance.

As the bus sped along 26th of July Avenue, I heard a woman behind me say sharply to a man in his twenties who was standing close behind me, “You are very wicked.” I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had parted my wraparound skirt and had unzipped his pants. Caught almost in the act, he smiled that smile I came to abhor; the smile that said, “Don't blame me. You're a woman out in public and a khawaga [a foreigner, a loose woman].”

My roommates and I became inured to bad behavior by the boys (shabbab), whocrawled under the seats in darkened movie theaters and grabbed our ankles, flashed us in street alleys in Alexandria, encircled us like sharks when we went swimming in the Mediterranean, and muttered ishta (cream) when we walked by them. We chalked it up to their sexual frustration due to the lack of socialization between the sexes, especially among the lower classes, starting at puberty.

“A dog's tail never stands straight,” says an Egyptian proverb about incorrigible habits, including the harassment and abuse of women by men.

In President Anwar Sadat's Egypt, which was opening to the West and modernizing, I was often harassed physically and verbally by men, but I never once feared for my life. Fear of Sadat's police and mukhabarat – the intelligence agents, who my roommates and I called the “green meanies” after the color of their uniforms — prevented men from public attacks on women, which are now so frequent and violent in the Arab Spring Egypt of President Mohammed Morsi.

Sexual assault of the kind that CBS News correspondent Lara Logan and many Egyptian women have suffered since the Jan. 25, 2010 revolution, which ousted President Hosni Mubarak, are the result of the general security breakdown. But they are also the result of a breakdown of human respect and decency, which is a growing worldwide phenomenon.

Innovation and modernization, including the empowerment of women and girls, is suspect and shattering for many men in Egypt, so they beat a dusty retreat into traditional mores. A substantial presence of women in public life in Egypt, and elsewhere in the world, might get the dog's tail to stand straight.

Comments

No chance in hell it may get the dog´s tail to stand straight. The problem is thus: There NEVER was a time where "decency and human respect" was known all over the world and accepted by all the countries, cultures and peoples…there were only pockets of emancipation and human rights that reigned over small parts of the world…flourished even in some countries…but in others no chance of that at all.
The emancipation of the woman is a WESTERN phenomenon. A phenomenon of the white blue eyed blonde christian who turned secular and LET his women have their emancipation. All over the western world women want to think they pretty much created the equality of men and women over night by the power of their female talents all by themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. IF in the US and in western Europe the men would not have stood by the women demanding equal rights, then it would have never became a reality. It was ever a joint operation by women AND men. But this is strictly a western phenomena. IN the east or in the south (Asia/Africa) there never was an alliance between men and women to end second class status for Women. And there never will be. Because the horrible truth is thus: To STRENGTHEN the woman, the man has to GIVE POWER UP…and we see this in the west every day. Now our neighbors in Asia and Africa are not completely stupid. They know that they must do the same. But the men are not prepared, not willing to do something like this. They do not want let go of their power. And so nothing will change, and there will be ever a rift between what happened in the west and what happens in Egypt.

No chance in hell it may get the dog´s tail to stand straight. The problem is thus: There NEVER was a time where "decency and human respect" was known all over the world and accepted by all the countries, cultures and peoples…there were only pockets of emancipation and human rights that reigned over small parts of the world…flourished even in some countries…but in others no chance of that at all.
The emancipation of the woman is a WESTERN phenomenon. A phenomenon of the white blue eyed blonde christian who turned secular and LET his women have their emancipation. All over the western world women want to think they pretty much created the equality of men and women over night by the power of their female talents all by themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. IF in the US and in western Europe the men would not have stood by the women demanding equal rights, then it would have never became a reality. It was ever a joint operation by women AND men. But this is strictly a western phenomena. IN the east or in the south (Asia/Africa) there never was an alliance between men and women to end second class status for Women. And there never will be. Because the horrible truth is thus: To STRENGTHEN the woman, the man has to GIVE POWER UP…and we see this in the west every day. Now our neighbors in Asia and Africa are not completely stupid. They know that they must do the same. But the men are not prepared, not willing to do something like this. They do not want let go of their power. And so nothing will change, and there will be ever a rift between what happened in the west and what happens in Egypt.

White House Chronicle on Social

Every field of endeavor gets stuck in a rut and it takes a pioneer, a rebel, to blast it loose. In journalism and literature, Tom Wolfe, who has died, age 88, did that, starting in the 1960s. His incendiary device was the “New Journalism.” It used the techniques of the novel in observation and quoted […]

Oh, dear! President Trump has hinted that journalists should lose their credentials. He probably means the passes which allow journalists to enter the White House complex at the Northwest Gate and to walk to the briefing room a few hundred yards away. Over the decades, successive administrations — in my accounting, starting with Jimmy Carter […]

The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner got just too celebrity ridden for its own good, as outfits who don’t know where the White House briefing room is lobbied for more and more tables. It used to be an annual drunk for journalists to visit each other and see and be seen. It was a chance […]

Rupert Murdoch stands astride the Atlantic. He is the most successful newspaper publisher in the United Kingdom and the proprietor of Fox, the most successful cable news channel in the United States. While he has many other spectacular holdings in the U.K., the United States, Australia and Asia, those are the two pillars on which […]